The cool air smells of spring. Buds are beginning to appear on the walnut and mulberry trees, but none of the oaks has yet shown signs of leafing out. Any day now I'm sure they will. I'm thinking of that pale green they'll have, so much lighter than the dense green of the sprouting grass.
There won't be many more mornings this season like today's was, with wood smoke flowing from chimneys and hazing the air and scenting it with its acrid harshness. Winter is on the wane. The vernal equinox is little more than a week away. As reminders, three camellias are pressed against my window screen, and dozens more are ready to bloom. I left the windows open all afternoon, and didn't close them until six o'clock. Tonight neither of the feral cats are in the back yard. They must be off exploring, enjoying the mild, bright night. I think I'll go out and enjoy it for a while myself.
Sunday Verse
Probing
by R. S. Thomas
No one would know you had lived, but for my discovery of the anonymous undulation of your grave, like the early swelling of the belly of a woman who is with child. And if I entered it now, I would find your bones huddled together, but without flesh, their ruined architecture a reproach, the skull luminous but not with thought. Would it help us to learn what you were called in your forgotten language? Are not our jaws frail for the sustaining of the consonants' weight? Yet they were balanced on tongues like ours, echoed in the ears' passages, in intervals when the volcano was silent. How tenderly did the woman handle them, as she leaned her haired body to yours? Where are the instruments of your music, the pipe of hazel, the bull's horn, the interpreters of your loneliness on this ferocious planet? We are domesticating it slowly; but at times it rises against us, so that we see again the primeval shadows you built your fire amongst. We are cleverer than you; our nightmares are intellectual. But we never awaken from the compulsiveness of the mind's stare into the lenses' furious interiors.